Bad Bad Web Techniques

OK it has been a long time coming, but as promised here is an article explaining various elements which can seriously hurt your website in the eyes of Google.

The first, and hopefully most obvious are hidden keywords; you know the type where you “hide” (via making the text the same colour as the background) loads of keywords (normally at the bottom of the page). The simple fact is that this used to work years ago but nowadays will just get you booted out of the Google index pretty quickly. Indeed this is one of the ’black hat’ techniques that Matt Cutts (Google anti-spam engineer) mentions specifically in his video posts (which you can of course view on this website).

Just to add, I do wonder why after working out your keywords, or least those that are quite useful for your website why you would then want to ’hide them’? Why not just create some content that actually uses these (within the given context). Is this really that more difficult?

The second problem I am going to mention is really a variant on the above, but one that is actually instigated by some-one else! You may or may not have seen a website that when you try to view it, Google instead shows you a page that states “this site may harm your computer”. This is the problem that we are discussing here.

The normal process is that your website gets hacked (either because your server security is inadequate, or because of a new security flaw is found within an application that you are using). Anyway the result is the same; some-else gets access to your server and edits your web-page, blog, etc. The normal course is that they normally try and hide links or keywords (see above); Or if you are really unlucky then they embed spy-ware etc which then tries to download this to the visitor of your website.

Now I know what you may be thinking, “yeah right, I think I would notice if someone had added something new to my website”! Well not if it was done in Javascript which would equate to potentially just one extra line of code in your HTML or XHTML which may or not be obfuscated! e.g. made very hard to understand. If you also add to this that often (in the cases we have seen) they add your IP address to a white list so that ‘you’ don’t see the links or download, or sometimes even only perform the action once in every N visits. The simple fact that the only true way to really work out if your source-code has changed is to either look at every line of code, or if you have a hash of the code to check, say the md5 hash check sum of your content.

Another negative method that we are going to discuss is links, or rather link farms; I say link farms as over the years I have heard many clients talking about the negative impact caused by links, which to be honest is not true, that is unless you are talking about link farms.

The best way to look at this, or rather the evidence, comes from the horses mouth e.g. Google. Google states that a website should be built for its visitors and NOT for google. So, if you run a web directory then there is no negative reason (e.g. we will get booted out of google) why you should have a no-follow on all of your clients links. The simple fact is that the ONLY reason a directory would do this is to keep all of their page rank on-site and not pass it on e.g. page rank shaping.

UPDATE:
Since writing this article, Google has announced a change in their ranking algorithm to target link and content farms – which is of course the right thing to do as these farms add nothing in terms of content to the Internet. You can read the press release from e-week below:

“Google Feb. 24 said it had flipped the switch on an algorithm change that pushes down low-quality Websites in its search engine, the latest in a series of moves to combat the rise of content farms and other Websites that infest the Web. – eweek.com”

Now to talk about link farms; A link farm is considered by Google not to be a directory but instead to be nothing but a page or pages of links. The truth is that sites like these were popular many years ago but nowadays have all but disappeared (fortunately). However they are still some and hence it is useful to be aware of these especially as some SEO companies will use these in order to boast the number of links that they provide you. I guess if you really want to be able to tell the difference, a directory will categorise its sites (links) rather than just have pages of links.

If you are now concerned about your links page on your website, don’t be. A websites link’s page has the rest of the site as content and hence will not considered a link-farm page by Google; Google is way smarter than that!

The last thing that we are going to discuss is stolen content; That is where you cut and paste a content from one website straight into yours. This is not only illegal in terms of copyright but more importantly will (since the change in Googles algorithm) seriously hurt your web site’s SEO, or position within the Google index.

In the past (before Google changed its algorithm) the only way you would get ‘caught’ would be if the original website has registered or hashed (somehow) their content. You would then normally get a ‘cease-and-desist’ from a solicitor or lawyer telling you to remove the stolen content. Now however, Google will automatically do this by moving your website to the bottom of the search index. e.g. You page rank will decrease either for the site as a whole or for just that page. In the worse case scenario, Google will boot your website out of the index completely and you will no longer appear when searching!

Now if you read the given content on a website and then re-write it using your own words, then this is fine and indeed is what most of the literary world do; It is a hard thing to create something (in terms of content) truly unique. Most things stand on the shoulders of others. This is fine and is just your interpretation of whatever you are writing about.